


The Book Was The Bagel All Along

by Ren_tal_Demon



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, I had to stop myself from resurrecting Klaus, Klaus Hargreeves Deserves Better, No Romance, No Smut, Not Beta Read, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Number Five | The Boy-centric, Sad, Sarcasm, Some Humor, Young Number Five | The Boy, but if not, i hope i convey, no beta we die like ben, no beta we just die, that I know of in this book
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:33:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29159709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ren_tal_Demon/pseuds/Ren_tal_Demon
Summary: When Five entered the Apocalypse at thirteen with his pride as big as he was stubborn, do you really think that he wouldn’t have scoured the remains of his home to find ALL evidence of what happened?Yes, he had found Vanya’s book, the eye, and all but Vanya and Ben, but what the hell happened to dear ol’ Reggie’s journal?
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

Even without Five, the original timeline was boringly similar to how it would go in a different universe.

The Umbrella Academy grew up. The Umbrella academy grew up to be emotionally stunted adults, but still a family nonetheless. So they gathered for the funeral of the cause of all their problems. 

Klaus dug around in the office. Diego took the monocle from Grace and bickered with Luther. Vanya took her pills. Allison rumored no one. 

Even without Five, the original timeline was boringly similar to how it would go in a different universe.

Yet, sometimes the world only needs a small amount of change to lead to extreme dissimilarities. 

Here is where it lies:

Klaus dug around the office, yes? However, this time, he emptied the box before leaving with it in his coat. 

Nothing else differed. The world still ended, after all. 

The world ended in light and fire then crumbled. 

Five blinked into existence, and cried. 

His home lay beneath his feet. When all he wanted was to cling to his pride and show his father what he can do, all of meaning lost substance when no one shared his world anymore. 

Five was one of seven siblings, and he lived in shared space for all of his 13 years of living. His birthday celebrated all of his siblings’ birth, not just his own. Now, he stood alone in a world of rubble. 

The ground shuttered and fire roared across its surface. 

With pride as big as he was stubborn, Five scoured the remains of his family and home until his fingers rubbed raw.

He needed to know what killed them in the end.  
Yes, he had found Vanya’s book, the eye, and all Vanya and Ben, but what the hell happened to dear ol’ Reggie’s journal?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Basically, Five finds soup but it goes wrong somewhere along the way, and I kinda rant about how young he is

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is not a major plot point. I just thought it was fun, please tell me if this is legible- it’s not beta-read  
> Edit: I added to the chapter because I didn’t think it captured how small he was and how bad it would be for this to happen, now I think it is perfectly sad enough

The sky, filled with ash and other burned up substances, would rain acid and lye when or if it did rain. 

Soon, Five would know this. He would live it. 

Barely scuffed shoes ran down what was once a street. Five came to stop at his home, unknown to him at what point it had fallen. 

He gasped for air and searched. His brothers, his sisters, would they have been trying to stop the cause of this abomination? 

They should’ve been. Five knew this. The seven of them, including Vanya, were the only people Five knew to try and stop the bad guys. That’s all they’d ever done, and it was believable to think they’d gathered together to stop an apocalyptic event. 

It was believable— if they even knew it was happening. 

No. They were still alive, weren’t they? Weren’t they?

He called out for Ben, Vanya, for his father. The two people he trusted the most, and the one person he thought of being too untouchable to die.

Five briefly felt angry at this situation, how could he be here? Why? Why did he do this? Who did this to his family?!

Suddenly, he turned to the only thing he knew— his power. 

Maybe he could go back— maybe the newest version of his power, time travel, could bring him back to his family—

His fists wobbled and he stayed put. 

He couldn’t. Five had no grasp of time travel until the previous moments.

Did he acorn? Or did he only break the ice? Five was only descending into the freezing depths. 

He crunched through gravel and broken walls, past what was once the plunging stairway to the kitchen —maybe he could find a way to get down there for food— and found what he thought might be the living room. 

He couldn’t tell just from the ceiling piled over everything, but the layout of his home was ingrained into his brain. 

It was just his quick flicking of eyes trying to spot any makings of a human at all— and he spotted a hand.

A dust and fingerless glove-covered hand gripped a glass eyeball. 

Five scrambled over, and looked at the hand before the person holding it. After prying it away, Five stared at the sphere like it could speak to him somehow then leaned over the body. An adult blonde male, too big for reality and covered with dust. 

It’s Luther. Five doesn’t know that until he sees the umbrella tattoo, but it’s Luther. 

The eye sat a little too lightly in his hand. 

From his squat, Five peered to see more. He spotted others, covered in dust and unrecognizable to him. 

Diego. 

Alison. 

Klaus. He was open-eyed, dead, and showing the tattoo to the world. 

They were grown adults, and he had just seen them as kids. Soldiers at 13. Five knew, however, that if all of them had been together at the end, they were his siblings. 

They were his siblings. They had to be! They lay there under dust and rumble and ceiling and, and, and—

There were only four of them. 

He couldn’t deal with it all. Five had to cry or at least let out his sorrow— so he screamed. Luckily no one was alive to hear such anguish (or they’d cry too, or at least call emergency services about a wailing kid across the street).

He was a child. He hadn’t seen any of the huge growth-spurts that would come in only a few years. Five had lived less than 1/7 of his life and everything was taken from him.

He was so small in such a big, empty world. 

First, he needed to ignore everything except for what was necessary. That meant stopping his sobbing then surviving. No thinking of what happens after or his feelings, he just needed to live to be able to do anything else. That was one thing he was glad to have ingrained in him— survival skills and probably more first aid abilities than a thirteen year old should know. 

Well, the first thing he actually did was wail a bit more and tug on the cement rocks covering his family, but later on Five would say that he’d immediately started to find shelter and food. 

Everything was so out of his depth after all, but that’s all he’d ever done: reach for the impossible. 

His hands would be raw for a couple days after clawing each of his siblings out from the refuse. Then for weeks later, his hands had scabs and small infections. 

After estimating the date— after all, he had not teleported into the cause of the end— he teleported to the ending, after everything died. Who knew exactly how long it had been since humanity lived?

Little tricycle God did. 

It had been approximately two weeks since the end of the world— by Five’s estimation at least, and it was a correct estimate as his entire thing was dealing with space and time— before Five started to get bored. A constant stream of activity had been hand fed to him every single day since he was born, and now nothing but him existed. 

He began to stockpile his own library— not the one he lived in, but a collection of books and worthy reads (of those that were still intact). Additionally, needed to go out to search for any new book that wasn’t ruined and also food and water. 

Thus, Five survived on scraps, canned food, and cockroaches. He had a fever while doing it. 

The first fever of the Apocalypse happened in May, a month after the end of the world. Of course, Five ignored the signs of being sick while also acknowledging that his hands were infected from digging out four corpses from debris. 

There were only four bodies he had found: three males and a female.

Klaus, Luther, Diego, and Allison were buried with the help of a kiddy shovel and Delores scolding from in her red wagon. 

“I am cleaning it well enough!” Five petulantly yelled at her, plain eyes staring back in annoyance. 

Delores, while being a mannequin, took the space of rationale in Five’s life and also replaced any human interaction he needed, including: sibling, friend, mother, and stranger. 

It’s safe to say that he clung to the first thing he saw that was human-esque. At least he wasn’t talking directly to himself. 

‘But if it’s infected, you may contract a fever.’ 

Grace had softly drilled medical techniques into the children by the hand of Reginald, and Five could almost recall her voice saying it. 

“Fever or not, I’m done cleaning my hands for the fifteenth time and I need to get food.”

True, it is better to be sick with food than without, but Five had already stockpiled a month’s worth of untouched perishables in the library shelter to have before moving into the nonperishables in the area. 

One cannot blame him for wanting to cling to the fresh fruit and vegetables left in the world before he had to eat canned food for the rest of his life. 

“I’m leaving you here today, Delores,” He stumbled out of the shelter, “Don’t be grumbling to me about it later.”

Today, Five chose a different direction and store to ravage. A casual quantum physics handbook and a couple comics were plucked from a fallen case to look at later, two packages of chalk found in a small corner store, and in the same place canned soup, small burners, and pans were found. 

With a dash, Five gathered some pans, remembered a spatula, remembered to also get cutlery, and piled them together in his wagon outside. 

Next: a gas powered burner to just... heat and cook things. 

That was piled in, and Five had to stop and breathe. He was still 13 and all this had to have been too much. Yes, that was the only reason. 

He needed a water break, but still walked into the store to find soup. The cans were stacked at the back wall of the store, and Five couldn’t have been happier. There was so much food, and he took armfuls. 

He took armfuls of cans, stopped to breathe, piled them in his wagon, went back to the soup, and tripped over his feet. 

Stopping to breath didn’t do much but to even out his exertion before he tired out. Stopping to breathe also meant breathing in the toxins of a burnt world if outside, and only lessened when in a shelter. 

Five’s head hit the linoleum of the store floor.

He suddenly remembered that his hands were infected— and he remembered Grace gently applying a cold cloth to his forehead— the linoleum was cold under his cheek— infections and fevers and cool and hot— was he warm or cold?

He knew he was definitely sick and stood up quickly anyways. 

“Oh, that’s not fun.” It is not in anyway fun to have your brain working overtime to support a sick and dehydrated body, so your heart rate increases when you stand, your head throbs, and maybe your sight diminishes briefly into black. 

Five quickly stumbled into a still standing shelf to try and get out, to get home. He was sick and needed to actually stop moving to get rid of the fever and other symptoms that would follow. 

The wagon bumped along with his stumbling. 

Good thing he had stuff to read— Five reassured himself as he reentered the library shelter. 

‘Five, you need to drink water and lay down,’

He did, and rarely slept. 

The first, not last, sickness he would encounter in the Apocalypse (but one of the most important in how he traversed in the future) happened in a library. 

His library shelter was read through until he survived a bit longer, then Five either added a book to his collection of favorites or burned and threw out reading that he memorized or grew weary of, and moved on. 

The life of Five in the Apocalypse carried on like so:

Read, scavenge, read, throw out, burn, repeat. He kept two constants: Extra-Ordinary: life of number Seven, and his father’s journal. 

The only book he never opened was that journal, and he hadn’t grown the guts to even open it past the death of all humanity. 

Why would he? The last time he had spoken with his father he had let his childish wants get in the way of thinking clearly. 

Of course he would wait until he thought it perfectly clear that he was sane enough to understand everything in his father’s book— in the hand writing of his father, about his siblings, about him, and about the umbrella academy. 

So he opened it in May the following year.


End file.
